


from zero

by rudimentaryflair



Category: 6 Underground (2019)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Don't copy to another site, Found Family, Gen, Light Angst, Post-Canon, Post-Turgistan, alternatively titled 'One Feels an Emotion', in which i relearn how to write and it's really obvious, rovach autocorrects to roach on grammarly and i think that's rather fitting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:27:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24464200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rudimentaryflair/pseuds/rudimentaryflair
Summary: The world was still a shitty place ─ that much hadn’t changed ─ but this, at least, made living in it easier.Or One, after Turgistan.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 99





	from zero

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the fic that has haunted every waking hour of my life for the past month and a half. 
> 
> You know, it was about time I wrote something for 6 Underground. I've been in a weird writer's block stint for a while, so writing has been like pulling teeth for me, but I loved this movie so much I just couldn't sit by and do nothing. So here's my disjointed take on One and his relationship with the team, Post-Turgistan.
> 
> Not beta-read.

One stumbles into the kitchen at four in the morning, still sweaty and shaking from a nightmare. He finds Two at the table staring at the bottom of a beer tumbler and tracing the hammer of her Glock with a thumb. The others are still sleeping in their rooms in the bunker, and between his trembling hands and the hollow expression on her face, it’s unclear which of them has had the worse night.

He can’t say he’s surprised when she silently presses her Glock into his hand. She wraps his other hand around the neck of a bottle of Cognac and watches him down half of it without changing expression. 

When he’s pulled himself together, she gets the silencer out of the kitchen drawer and they take turns taking potshots at the barren wasteland outside the trailers.

There’d been no pleasure in killing Rovach. One knows the team can feel it, sees it in their eyes: a heavy sense of finality, a facsimile of contentment. At the end of the day, Rovach was just a notch under their belt, a small shard of everything wrong with the world they had shoved into a box and tucked away. 

There would be other boxes. Someone else would fill Rovach’s shoes, if not in Turgistan, then somewhere else, another piece to the fucked up puzzle that was humanity. They were stuck, forever chipping away at the unrelenting line of black hearts stretched before them, innumerable.

One remembers finding a child’s shoe trampled into the Turkish dirt, a strange little corpse. Something furious and desperate keens in his chest.

There should be limits, he thinks, to how cruel humans can be. 

“There are certain things you can’t kill,” One says. In the silence, it sounds like a scream. 

Beside him, Two watches him aim at the ground below the horizon with the chilling calm focus she only saves for contemptible autocrats and bad nights. Her lips are pressed into a thin scar on her face. “Yes,” she agrees, “but we do our best.”

In the distance dust clouds bloom, blurry roses against the sky.

~

They’re walking up the front steps of St. Mary’s and One is feeling awkward in his civilian khakis and plaid button-up, the Nevada heat making his palms clammy. He nervously fidgets with the large bouquet of yellow daisies he’s holding and Three motions for him to straighten his back before they enter. 

One shoots him an irritated look at this. “What are you, my mother?”

“No,” Three says coolly, “but you’re meeting mine, so try to make a good impression,” and he pushes past one of the metal doors while One is pulling faces at the back of his head.

His mother is a short woman with platinum hair that falls in wispy curls over her forehead and the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, roosting in one of the beds lined up along the drab gray-blue walls. Three places the bouquet of daisies on her lap, tugging on a floral print sleeve.

“Hey _mamá,”_ Three says softly, softer than One has ever heard him. “You remember the good man I was talking about before? I brought him to meet you.”

“You talk about me to her?” One asks incredulously, and Three shoots him a look. “I mean. Hello ma’am.” He tries for a charming smile.

Three’s mother stares at him for an unnervingly long time, and for a moment, One is afraid she’ll do something drastic like kick him out of the room, or even worse, ask for his name, but she squeals in delight and grabs Three’s arm.

“Oh _mijito!”_ she says. “I’m so glad you’re making friends! And such handsome ones, too.” One looks at Three in alarm.

 _“Mamá,”_ Three complains, surprisingly bashful, but he’s smiling, so it can’t be all that bad. One releases a breath and allows his mother to pull him closer so she can examine him.

They stay for another half hour, Three chatting amiably to his mother about the past couple of months, One discreetly stepping on his toes whenever he gets too close to saying something incriminating and interjecting with his own little comments here and there. The conversation ends with Three’s mother telling Three to eat more because he’s so thin and to please bring that lovely French girl around again sometime, which makes One have to hide a snort behind a hand.

“That’s it, then?” One asks when they leave the ward. 

Three looks at him quizzically. “What do you mean, ‘that’s it’?” They pass by one of the nurses on the way out, a mousy man that Three glares at with surprising ferocity.

“I just thought that you’d risk blowing your cover for something more important,” One says conversationally, only half thinking about the words leaving his mouth. 

Three’s eyes flash, and it suddenly occurs to him that he has just said something very wrong.

Instead of shooting him, Three barks a short, wry laugh. “Damn, I know you’re an orphan or whatever, but I didn’t think you’d be this clueless.” One bristles and opens his mouth, but Three bowls right over him. “Didn’t you have anyone you cared about back then?” A pause. “Please say yes. Otherwise, I would feel kind of bad.”

“Yes,” One snaps. He can feel his hackles rising like they do whenever one of the other Ghosts starts talking about the past, the dull ache he’s been suppressing for the past five years flaring up like pressing fingers down into a bruise. One imagines crushing it with a boot heel and straightens up.

“Yes,” he says again, calmer.

“Then you should know how important this is,” Three says. He looks One straight in the eyes. “It’s important to remember who we’re doing this for.”

One is dimly aware of his hands curling into fists. Several images pass through his mind like snapshots: sleek brown hair splayed across the pillow beside him, a small boy sitting behind a metal gate, dog fur under his hands and a lolling tongue in his face. 

Three must see something in his expression, because he smirks, smug, and then turns away, pulling his car keys out of his pocket, not caring that One has stopped walking.

One stands in the middle of the street, watching Three’s back slowly get smaller. He breathes in. Breathes out. Uncurls his hands. Carefully tucks the memories away, photos in a metal cabinet. 

Then he runs to catch up. 

~

As it stands, he is barreling down a very narrow path between two ramshackle buildings, cursing the city traffic and his inability to reload while running. The smog in the air makes it hard to draw in the air he desperately needs, lungs and legs burning as he clears the alleyway, frantically trying to catch a familiar head of blond hair. 

It’s easy to forget how young Four is. He gets along with the others comfortably enough, bickers and swears at them like they’re siblings, and when One is watching him effortlessly scale a skyscraper or waltz down the side of a twenty-story spire, his age is the last thing on his mind.

But now, with Four gasping into the comms, it’s the only thing One can focus on. 

_“I’m out of bullets,”_ Four chokes, voice desperate and threaded with pain, and One is thinking, this is a kid. This is just a kid.

Their next job in Cairo had gone from the most brilliant scheme they’d ever come up with to a flaming pile of shit within the first ten minutes. Honestly by this point, One’s not even sure why they bother to plan these things. 

It should’ve been a simple snatch-and-grab. _Should’ve,_ because somehow, the mark had gotten wind of the mission and was now well on his way to the outer city limits. And unfortunately for the team, he was a guy who knew another guy, and the other guy happened to be the right-hand man of a newly minted crime syndicate, with an entire crew of armed hitmen on speed dial. 

But the mark, the syndicate, the hitmen ─ those are all just embellishments, inconsequential details of little importance. 

The important thing is that Four is screaming himself hoarse, so loudly that One can’t hear anything else. He goes abruptly silent, which somehow feels louder than the scream. The others start shouting in alarm over the comms. 

“Four,” One says, carefully calm because he can’t afford to be anything else. “Talk to me. What’s your status?”

There’s a long, horrible two seconds where Four doesn’t say anything. Then:

 _“He’s going to kill me,”_ Four gasps, high and grating like static, and One has a horrible recollection of finding Four lying crumpled on the deck of a cruise in Tirgustan, arm twisted at an angle like the broken wing of a bird. 

He finds them sprawled in the middle of a dusty street: Four on his back, some no-name henchman jamming his forearm into his throat, other arm swinging viciously at his head. One wastes no time embedding a bullet between his eyes; he gets a sick sort of satisfaction watching his brains splatter in the dirt behind him. He’s by Four’s side before the body hits the ground.

The kid’s face is a bloody mural. Almost in a trance, One wipes away the worst of it with a sleeve, checks him for damage; his leg is bent oddly ─ sprained or broken ─ but Three will be there soon with the pickup truck, and One doesn’t know when he started caring, still doesn’t know if he wants to, but he knows he’s glad Four is alive, and that, for now, is enough. 

Four winces when One brushes against a bruise ─ his entire face is practically one giant bruise ─ and pushes himself up to his elbows. 

“Fuck,” he says, voice shaking. “I thought you were gonna leave me behind.” _I thought I was going to die,_ he doesn’t say, but One hears it anyway.

“No,” One says, and lets the kid press his face into his shoulder. “No, we don’t do that anymore.”

~

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Five snarls when she corners him in the plane lavatory. One would block her from coming in, but his vision is going kind of spotty and all his energy is being used to keep him standing. She shoves him to the ground against the bathtub with embarrassing ease and starts stripping him of his kevlar and shirt. 

Belatedly, he realizes that he’s bleeding all over the tile floor. 

“That’d better come out,” he slurs and Five says, “Shut _up,”_ and does something with her hands that makes him swear. 

Five stitches him together with clinical efficiency, muttering under her breath as she works. The whole time, One stares at the towel bar over her head, grimacing whenever the needle passes through his skin too roughly. He thinks he nods off at one point; his head feels stuffed full of cotton, the air touching his skin feverishly warm.

After what feels like several hours, Five sits back on her haunches and pulls off her gloves, the elastic snapping. She casts them aside and One watches them leave tiny bloody smears on the floor.

They stay motionless in their positions for a few moments, not looking at each other, before Five says, “You know you’re not actually a ghost, right?”

One blinks at her. “I know,” he says slowly, unsure of where this is going.

“Bullets can and will kill you.”

“I know,” One repeats.

“Good, because I’d hate to have to explain what a metaphor is.” Five puts her palms on her knees and pushes herself up from the floor; One thinks she’s going to leave, but she just slumps back down against the bathtub beside him, sighing.

“Is this the part where we hold hands and talk about our feelings?” One asks. 

Five ignores this. “You’re not a ghost,” she says emphatically. “You’re alive, and you have people who care about you.”

He can feel her eyes boring into the side of his head, and he can’t bring himself to look at her. His mouth is suddenly very dry. “I know,” One says again, a little hoarse. 

“Then please, stop making my job harder,” Five says, and she sounds so weary that One startles himself with a laugh, the sound starting off harsh and forced before gradually trickling into something more genuine. It hurts a bit, pulls at his stitches, but he can’t find it in himself to care. 

Then, because One can’t help himself, he holds up an arm and makes a show of poking and prodding it. “See?” he says. “Solid. Not a ghost.”

“I hate you,” Five grumbles, but there’s no bite to it, and One can see the corners of her mouth curving up. 

Despite being sprawled on the hard floor of a private charter and missing a fourth of his blood, One is pleasantly surprised to find that he’s quite comfortable where he is, sleepy from endorphins and kind of fuzzy around the edges. Five stretches her legs across the bathroom and tilts her head back against the tub, and One does the same, closing his eyes and feeling the plane ride the turbulence like a boat on a wave. 

~ 

The team carries Six everywhere with them: in the gaps on the shelves where true crime novels once lived alongside Five’s medical textbooks, in the space Four always leaves beside him on the couch. In the way Three drives, slow and careful with no abrupt turns or impatient accelerations, and how Two always buys two shots for herself at bars and doesn’t drink one until the very end of the night. It’s fitting, having all those empty places to remember him by; they’ve learned to live with him, like they learned to live with their past lives, not quite buried but resting. 

They’re at a pub in a city none of them have been to before, because that’s what they do after a successful mission: get smashed. It’s not so much a team bonding exercise as a coping mechanism, but the others like it enough and One has the money to spare; there’s really nothing like a good old fashioned Manhattan in an unfamiliar town after a near-death experience.

There’s a vacant stool beside him, and One can’t stop thinking about how Six didn’t live long enough to get drinks with them the first time around. He’d been a good kid, or at least, as good as he could have been: easygoing and quick on his feet, strangely cheerful for someone who used to work for the mob, someone pronounced dead. 

There had been something gently wrong with him, just like there was something wrong with each and every one of them, a black stain over their hearts that made the world just a little easier to bear. They couldn’t afford to be soft in that life, but Six had an almost kindness to him, an eagerness to do better; he ran a short fuse, burned bright and fast, and One knows the kid wouldn’t have had it any other way. 

Back in the present, the others have already moved past the zealous chugging part of the night and started winding down, dividing into smaller groups: Five, Four, and Seven talking quietly among themselves over their drinks, Three passed out at the bar and Two petting his hair with an almost fondness. It’s hard to see the gaps then, places where Six might fit in. 

In Florence, Six had grinned, a sharp and boyish thing, as he steered the car wildly through the streets. He’d been happy, however short-lived it was. One wonders if he’s still happy, wherever he is now. He hopes so.

~

Seven does this thing where he smiles. Not one of those beaming, brilliant things, but a small quirk of the lips, mouth barely curving up. He’ll look at the team ─ at their strange, ragtag group of international criminals and murderous hasbeens ─ and he’ll just smile. Like there’s no other place he’d rather be; like he’s not even sure he’s doing it. 

It used to set One’s teeth on edge. That smile was dangerous, a storm waiting to happen; it meant he cared, and they couldn’t afford to care.

But he’d gotten accustomed to it, like he’d gotten accustomed to Three and Two sleeping in the same room, to watching everyone stop calling to each other by their numbers. He can’t bring himself to use their names yet, too afraid of what it would mean, but he likes to think he’s getting accustomed to caring, too. 

He catches himself doing it one day. They’re walking from the bunker to the cargo plane, a trek they’ve made about a hundred times by now, all six of them cranky from being roused too early, and there’s something so charming and _right_ about it that One just can’t help himself. The world was still a shitty place ─ that much hadn’t changed ─ but this, at least, made living in it easier. 

Out of the corner of his eye, One sees Seven watching him, a smug grin threatening to break out on his face. Quickly, he stops smiling. 

“Shut up,” One says, and is promptly horrified when it comes out fond instead of angry.

Seven smirks wider, knowingly. “I didn’t say anything.”

“I said _shut up.”_

**Author's Note:**

> One: *is an unemotional husk*  
> Seven, asking for everybody's names: I'm about to end this whole man's career
> 
> If you want to reblog this fic and support me on Tumblr, you can [here](https://rudimentaryflair.tumblr.com/post/619591850783866880/from-zero-rudimentaryflair-6-underground). I'm rudimentaryflair!


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